 All right. Cool. I have my paper. I just want you to know. I've got my water. And I told them I have my paper. So we're OK. Why don't I have a seat real quick? OK. So this is something that's near and dear to your heart. I know that you're super passionate about this particular problem. So why don't you just kind of give us the, what's the top line here? I think for me, I just hate it when they're inefficiencies and when I don't like wasting time is really what it is. And I think it's just really interesting that oftentimes we try to optimize for solutions. And in doing so, make the job even harder than it needs to be. And I think what a straight line actually looks like in practice is really different from what we think it looks like in our minds. And oftentimes, building something isn't the fastest way to solve something. I guess that's what I would say. Gotcha. So I guess the problem that you're describing is within the enterprise, we tend to be pretty inefficient for all kinds of different reasons. Yes. And we shouldn't just build software as soon as we see a problem. I don't think we should just build something. Yeah, maybe stop and think about it. So what does that mean? How does that actually play out? How do you not jump to the let's go build something solution? Well, I think first it's kind of like, I think it's the same thing with anything, right? You kind of think through the stages of what actually is the problem. And first you have to state there is a problem. It's important to acknowledge it. And then it's important to be aware of what's actually happening before you jump into action. And I think oftentimes what we do is to say, well, there's this problem. Let's just fix it. And if you don't take a little bit of time to think about what actually is happening and what are the dynamics of the situation and flip it over from every side, you end up jumping to whatever is the easiest thing for you. And the easiest thing for you will be whatever you are habitually used to. And as engineers, regardless of whether we're talking about a computer engineer, so software engineer or otherwise, we're literally trained to engineer things, to build things and solve. And I think that's great. But there are a lot of other things that maybe aren't necessarily our strengths that could actually improve the way that we go about reaching the best solutions possible. So what do you think the biggest challenge is? Because that sounds obvious, right? Like, of course, we should think about what we're going to do before we do it. But yet we don't. So what do you think the inhibitor is? The inhibitor is that it's hard to acknowledge what you can't see. And we as humans only see a certain amount. And within our organizations, we're used to working in given spaces. So for instance, in the example that we discussed, we were doing work to try and figure out, OK, we have a customer. And they expressed concerns or felt that their communication could have been better. They didn't have as much visibility as they would have liked into what's happening on the R&D side of our company, because they speak directly with our balanced account team, which is effectively like our customer experience team. And there was an opportunity there for us to effectively think about how interdepartmentally, so between research and development, between our balanced account team and between even our support teams, how can we improve the things that we're each seeing to ensure that the end-to-end experience for our customer is more seamless? And I think that's what can be difficult. R&D sits over here. The balanced account team sits over there. Support sits over there. And even in terms of the way that most organizations are structured, they're completely separate departments with completely different arms of leadership. And they don't, by default, talk to each other. And that's something that we realized we had to be a little bit more proactive about when we think about how that cross-communication is happening. It's not just something that implicitly occurs. Yeah. Yeah, there's an old analogy or a story that people use, which is back when we had three-tier architectures, the way you'd fix a bug or the place that you fix the bug was directly related to who got the bug report. So if it was the UI team, they were going to fix it in the UI. The DBAs found the problem. There were going to be some stored procedures. And I mean, that was the reality for the enterprise, was there was severe lack of communication. So OK, so that's the challenge. And what would you recommend when you run into a situation where either internally at Pivotal or when you're working with a customer, and what are the things that you actually recommend, or some concrete steps people can use to either identify that they have this challenge? And if they already know they have it, then what can they do to fix it? Well, so as my actual role title is technical program manager, and one litmus test that I tell people is the moment that you're doing something that touches another team, stop and think about what that communication might look like. Oftentimes, teams have very different communication pipelines, very different process pipelines. And the moment that you touch another team, their pipeline actually directly affects yours, even though, again, because it's a long, a value streamer, or along a chain. And so it's important to take time to pause and say, OK, well, if we're touching this pipeline, what happens when? Let's imagine that we're in a race. What happens when I hand off the baton to you? Is it actually going to be caught? Are we going to drop something? And it makes sense to take some time just to think about what does that look like? What does that mean? How is that going to impact our overall, for instance, cycle time? Like, how long is it going to take for this thing to get through this part of your pipeline and come out the other end back to me? So I think just having a conversation and keeping in mind that the moment that something touches someone else, it becomes a part of your ecosystem. That's interesting. So that's sort of the initial moment that you realize you have another team. Do you have any advice for how do you maintain that over time? Because it's become part of your ecosystem now. So what do you do? And actually, someone just asked me a tweet question about this from the panel earlier. But I think it is possible to start small and run a small experiment. So the reason that I wrote this and the reason that this entire topic started was because we started by looking at one customer, one of our larger customers, and said, OK, what does your experience look like? And we effectively used that as our initial guinea pig. We're not trying to solve everything across the mayor or everything globally or everything across the states. It's simply, what are some of the issues that we're seeing here, some of the communication? And effectively, take that experiment and then figure out, OK, what value are we getting from these results? What's significant and what isn't? And then how can we leverage those learnings across two teams, across three teams? And of course, strategically pick which teams make the most sense because you want them to be representative. But you don't have to solve everything all at once. And starting small is just as valuable. You just have to make sure that you have someone from each area that's going to be touched. OK. And so in this particular example, I just want to make sure the audience is clear about this. Kind of the core problem we were solving was improving the way that your company was interacting amongst departments, but also into the customer. So that challenge sounds pretty relevant to almost everybody in the room, right? Absolutely. Whether you're a technology vendor. Systems integrators in particular, that seems like the type of thing that they'd run into quite a bit. Absolutely. And again, I think sometimes we just forget that even setting expectations of, OK, R&D, what do we think that we're responsible for and support? What do you think that we're responsible for? Are those things aligned? Are they the same? Balance account team, do we understand what role you play in making sure that this happens? And do we all understand how we can make each other's lives easier? And then do we all understand what that looks like for the customer if this one piece gets missed? What's the impact? And then for the customer, do they also understand what's actually happening so that they have an idea or have set expectations around why something takes the amount of time it does, why a solution is chosen over another? So it's all about creating visibility and then also just making sure that people understand what's happening because once people understand what's happening, it's a lot easier for them to have empathy and a lot easier for them to be more patient on every single side. Absolutely. So if you were to try to boil this down into the simplest form of advice, almost a Zen statement. I took notes. She brought her papers. I think that's great. We've got 50. So let's boil this down, the simplest bit of advice, like the essence of the challenge, what would that be? I think there are four things that I would leave people with. The first one is get comfortable with being uncomfortable when you feel safe to do so. So it's important to create an environment where people can safely take risks. The next one would be make sure that you're not taking things for granted because, and again, I think sometimes when we're in our department or we're in our space, we don't think about not only the opportunities and the great things that we have, but also the effects or the impacts that our actions have on other people. Additionally, there is something to be gained from every experience. So don't leave learnings on the table. Don't leave learnings on the table. It's a waste of money, a waste of time. So keep in mind that there's always something to be learned. And then the last one would be know the difference between guidelines and rules. I think sometimes we set up systems that's similar to Kongmai's law. We set up systems to help us, but we don't keep in mind that there's nothing wrong with changing them, but you also have to create space to allow for change where it makes sense. Yeah. I found when we talked earlier, I found that to be the most important, I think, of all of that, which is in our organizations, we're not talking about law. What we're doing is we're talking about a bunch of ideas about how we should operate. Absolutely. And let's learn together and actually change that. Yeah. It's great. Well, thank you very much for taking the time and sharing some of your thoughts and experience on that. So thank you, Jesus. Thanks. Appreciate it.